Vincent Oberle’s blog
How I use my Skype cordless phone
For Christmas we got ourselves one of the RTX Skype cordless phones. Skype runs directly on the device, without the need for a PC.
The question came which Skype user name to use on the device. Using my main Skype name was not really an option. First I would not be the only user of the phone, as we share it with my wife. Second, if I had used my main Skype name, I would have appeared always online to my contacts. This is inconvenient, because I use Skype heavily for work. By the way, we are working at Skype to improve this situation and to make your online status behave nicely when being signed-in on multiple PC or devices.
So the solution we chose was to create a new Skype account for the family that would be signed-in on the phone. But we didn’t give this name to all our contacts. My wife and myself set our main Skype accounts to call-forward to this family account. This is Skype-to-Skype forwarding and it is free.
When someone calls us on our main accounts, or on our SkypeIN numbers, if we don’t answer on our laptops, the call gets forwarded to the cordless phone, without the caller noticing. Our contacts don’t need to wonder on which name to call us, they keep using our main accounts.
It’s a pretty neat solution I think. We still need however to give the family account to the people we want to call from the cordless phone, because they need to authorize our family account. But this is a limited number of people, not a big deal.
